Deuteronomy 22:13-21 is one of the scarier passages for impressionable young Christian women, as it seems to hold up pre-marital sex as a crime punishable by death. Even for married women, such as myself, the passage can be puzzling: hymeneal blood following intercourse is a notoriously unreliable proof of virginity.
Well, having just published 2,600 words explaining this law (and that doesn’t count the footnotes), I thought I’d give the short version. Here it is in fewer than 500 words:
| About Deuteronomy 22:13-21 | What I originally thought | What I think now |
| It regulates: | pre-marital sex | threats to family honour |
| It assumes: | all brides were expected to be virgins | brides were expected to be virgins when virgin bridewealth had been paid |
| The groom’s complaint is: | that his bride wasn’t a virgin | slander, plain and simple |
| The case is formally initiated by: | the groom, against his bride that she was not a virgin | the bride’s parents, against the groom, because he is slandering their daughter’s and her family’s honour |
| The bride’s parents: | defend their daughter | are the plaintiffs |
| The burden of proof is on: | the parents, even though they are the defendants(?!) | the parents, who substantiate their case with bedsheets stained with hymeneal blood |
| The fate of the bride rests on: | an unreliable virginity test associated with the hymen | whether the bride’s parents want to uphold her honour |
| If the parents present bloodied bedsheets: | the bride is vindicated as having been a virgin | the bride’s and her family’s honour is vindicated |
| The evidence, if presented: | is considered scientifically genuine | is interpreted according to custom; if the parents say it was genuine, everyone has to accept that |
| If the bride had been a virgin but her hymen didn’t bleed: | the law would give a false guilty verdict for her | that probably wouldn’t be a deciding factor in the outcome of the case |
| If the verdict goes against the groom: | he is punished for falsely accusing his bride (but not with death, even though hers was a capital crime?!) | he is punished for falsely attempting to (1) slander the bride’s family honour, (2) recoup the bridewealth, and (3) obtain a divorce |
| The verses where the bride is not vindicated: | are an alternative outcome to the initial scenario, except the groom’s accusation is upheld | are a sub-case and a separate law added at a later date |
| If the verdict goes against the bride: | she is found guilty of pre-marital sex | she is found guilty of subverting her parents’ authority and undermining social order |
| The focus on female sexuality: | is weird; when a man has pre-marital sex it’s not a capital crime | reflects gendered assumptions about how family honour is upheld, but honour expectations applied to both sons and daughters |
| The underpinning ideology: | is the same behind both halves of the law | is different for first case and the sub-case |
| The death penalty clause should be understood: | solely in legal and literal terms | as possibly written by a moralist rather than a law-giver |
| The death penalty reflects: | the importance of saving sex until marriage | one of a number of possibilities: the assertion of patriarchal authority over women’s sexuality, an ideal to remind the people to be faithful to YHWH, or the seriousness of undermining social order |
| In the New Testament, Mary: | is the epitome of a young woman who waited until marriage; Christian women should emulate her | was innocent; this challenges Christians to re-evaluate our understanding of how sex should/shouldn’t relate to social order |
References are given in detail in the full post, but they include:
- Aaron Koller: Sex or Power? The Crime of the Bride in Deuteronomy 22 p279-296, Zeitschrift für Altorientalische and Biblische Rechtsgeschichte, 2010:16
- Pressler, Carolyn, and Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob. The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws (1991): ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Web.
- Milstein, Sara J. “Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: The Independent Logic of Deuteronomy 22:25–27.” Journal of Biblical Literature 137.3 (2018): 625-43. Web
- Edenburg, Cynthia. “Ideology and Social Context of the Deuteronomic Women’s Sex Laws (Deuteronomy 22:13-29).” Journal of Biblical Literature 128.1 (2009): 43-60. Web.
These sources also cite:
- Alexander Rofé, Family and Sex Laws in Deuteronomy and the Book of Covenant,” Henoch 9 (1987): 131–59 (cf. in Hebrew in Beit Miqra 22 [1977]: 19–36)
Further reading/watching:
- I have a 30 minute video essay on Facebook that goes through the whole of Deuteronomy 22:13-29; so it includes these laws and the ones that follow it in the rest of the chapter
- If you’d like more detail on the second law (where the bride is stoned to death) and how to exegete it, you might like: Five things I’d explain to a teenage girl if she asked about Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (assuming she has the courage to)
- Or indeed this piece that I wrote for CBE International: Proving My Virginity: Deuteronomy, Pap Smears, and the Hymen Myth
- There’s also Bailey Bergmann Steger’s writing about how you don’t have to break the hymen: The Sex Myth That Just Won’t Go Away
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